The practice of copyright law in the past has depended on the difficulty of reproducing some physical object, whether it be a printed book, a recorded disc or a tape. To be complete, it has always been possible for an individual to reproduce such objects, but it has typically not been economically viable, given either the time cost or opportunity cost of transcribing the information contained in the physical object to another. Also, the copies resulting from this process have, until now, tended to be of a lesser quality than the original. However, with the advent of digital storage of information, this balance of costs has been upset.
The value of a copyrighted work is not necessarily imbued in the physical object which contains the creation, but rather in the information which makes up the work itself. Thus, when the opportunity cost of duplicating the work becomes vanishingly small (as is the case for many digital media streams today), the copyright protection process has to deal with that issue in a new manner. Essentially, all creations that can be encapsulated in digital form are subject at some point to this concern.
Although it may be impractical to duplicate a given large digital data stream at this point in time, the cost of duplication and storage of such data streams is constantly declining, as is the cost of transmitting those data over long distances. Also, digital storage allows one to make perfect copies that do not degrade over time or through repeated use. As such, the lifetime of these large data sets can potentially outlive their economic viability, at which point, it is of much lower consequence whether the stream is open for free distribution or not. This length of viability places an upper limit on the amount of security that is appropriate for use in controlling access to the data.
The current state of the public art in digital security algorithms can be readily gleaned through a perusal of online information or via the various publications and patents which examine this subject, some of the more recent of which include U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,652; U.S. Pat. No. 6,330,670; U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,070; U.S. Patent Publication No. 20020013772; U.S. Pat. No. 6,226,742; U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,605; and “Architectural Support for Copy and Tamper-Resistant Software, by David Lie, et al. (Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems aka ASPLOS-IX, Cambridge, Mass. 2000) all of which are fully incorporated fully herein by reference.
Prior art systems utilize a few basic operational categories of digital data encryption and decryption technologies. These categories are based on the use of the security algorithms themselves and are independent of the actual mechanism for encrypting or decrypting the actual data. These well-known technologies and widely described classifications and technologies are:                One-Way Hashing mechanisms and/or Message Digests.        Message Authentication Systems        Digital Signatures        Secret Key Encryption Systems        Public Key Encryption Systems        
The means by which these technologies are used in a given security system is known as a security protocol. Note that the security protocol is independent of the actual underlying mechanics of how the various functions are implemented. As such, even a perfectly secure encryption algorithm may potentially be used inside a security protocol that compromises overall security in such as way as to defeat the secure aspect of the encryption technology itself. Consequently, the overall security of any given security system is dependent not only on the relative strength of the underlying security technologies but also by the way in which these security technologies are put into use. Prior attempts at implementing security system have made (artificial) distinctions between the various types of bit streams to be protected. On a fundamental level, all binary digital data can be reduced to a stream of 1's and 0's (a bitstream), which can be stored and retrieved in a manner which is completely independent of the intended purpose or interpretation of that bitstream. The fact that the data contained in any particular bitstream is used to convey a piece of text or a photograph or even a piece of executable object code is not relevant to the manner in which or the device where the bitstream is stored.
Thus, there is a need for security protocols which do not depend on an arbitrary distinction between digital data types. These protocols, which may utilize industry standard security technologies and other types of security standards to better and more efficiently protect digital content, may themselves be expressed in terms of a digital bitstream. Thus, such a protocol would be equally capable of securing itself. This self-referencing behavior is known as the property of “recursion” and such a security protocol may be termed a “Recursive Security Protocol”.